Ignatieff looks to spin narrative to unseat Harper

The polls don’t look very promising for any of the opposition parties. And the economy isn’t exactly waving a “Save Me — Turf the Tories” election sign.

So as the Liberals embark on their five-week campaign to end Stephen Harper’s five-year run as prime minister, they are counting heavily on the ability of Michael Ignatieff to weave a compelling master narrative — from the threads of a dozen or so lesser storylines — about the Conservative government’s alleged “contempt” for democracy.

The tale the Liberal leader has promised to tell Canadian voters has a lot of minor characters and plot twists that aren’t easy for a casual observer of politics to keep straight.

Quick: Can you define prorogation? Why did the head of Statistics Canada quit his job? Who was that ousted nuclear watchdog? And why does Ignatieff’s “Contempt” story have chapters titled “In-and-Out”, “Not”, and “Bruce Carson’s Girlfriend”?

The storytelling challenges are formidable. Perhaps it’s not a bad thing for Harper’s chief challenger, then, that he’s got some serious credentials as a writer and novelist, and is among the handful of Canadians — alongside the likes of Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields and Yann Martel — who have been finalists for the Man Booker Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards.

But will the 2011 election produce a bestseller for Ignatieff, or land his political career — thud — in the remainder bin?

For the Liberal contender, there’s no nationwide financial upheaval to exploit or a single, game-changing political scandal to build his campaign epic around.

Compare the brevity and alliterative elegance of “sponsorship scandal” with “inadequate information disclosures on the costs of justice bills” — the actual trigger, along with a fairly unremarkable federal budget, for the current election.

But Ignatieff, also a broadcaster and human-rights scholar of considerable renown, knows how to spin a yarn. And he’s got some decent material to work with (depending on your political point of view), including the Conservative government’s highly controversial decision last year — over the advice of the Harper-appointed head of Statistics Canada, Munir Sheikh — to scrap Canada’s long-form census.

The uproar led to Sheikh’s resignation, one of several high-profile Conservative clashes with top bureaucrats and oversight officers (including former nuclear safety regulator Linda Keen, ex-veterans ombudsman Col. Pat Stogran and parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page) that have cemented the Harper government’s reputation for uncompromising, heavy-handed policy-making.

Last month, in a preview of what Ignatieff has now dramatically labelled as Harper’s “politics of personal destruction,” the Liberal party included Sheikh and the three others in a “Conservative enemies list of watchdogs and officials who have been fired, forced out, harassed or publicly maligned by the Harper government and its culture of secrecy, control and intimidation.”

It’s a campaign pitch with elements of a Cold War spy thriller — not Ignatieff’s natural genre, but he’s demonstrated considerable range as a storyteller in the past.

In addition to penning numerous non-fiction books, screenplays and essays on world affairs, Ignatieff is the author of the celebrated, semi-autobiographical novel, Scar Tissue, shortlisted for the Booker in 1993, that explores a man’s emotional struggles as his once-vibrant mother falls victim to Alzheimer’s disease.

He also wrote the critically un-acclaimed novels Asya (1991), about the intersection of a Russian woman’s life with the great historical events of the 20th century, and Charlie Johnson in the Flames (2003), about a foreign correspondent’s search for a war criminal.

On the hustings over the next five weeks, Ignatieff will attempt to craft a political page-turner from a series of sub-plots encompassing — among other episodes — Harper’s suspension of Parliament in late 2008, the Tories’ “in-and-out” campaign-financing dispute with Elections Canada, and a recent stationery blunder in which Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s cabinet role and political-fundraising interests were improperly blurred.

Then there was International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda’s mishandled rejection of a $7-million federal payout to the church group KAIROS for its foreign-aid work. Oda’s initial suggestion that she didn’t know how the word “not” got scrawled on a bureaucrat’s memo recommending approval of the funds nearly cost the minister her job — and should have, in Ignatieff’s version of the incident.

Expect other “undemocratic” actions on the part of the Harper government — the clampdown on media access-to-information and the accusations of withholding of full costs for new jails and fighter jets — to get prominent play in the story Ignatieff is shaping for the electorate.

As he stood in the House of Commons on Friday, moments after introducing the non-confidence motion that brought down the Harper government, Ignatieff offered a glimpse of how he’ll be framing his campaign narrative.

“We are here today because of a long pattern of abuse, not simply the withholding of documents on this particular occasion,” he thundered. “There is a longer pattern of abuse that goes back to the shutting down of Parliament on two occasions. When the government of Canada was under pressure, facing just criticism from members of this House, it chose to prorogue. Canadians did not like that. It set the pattern of contempt, the pattern of disrespect, the pattern of abuse of our democracy that brings us to this place.”

Inviting voters to perceive a “pattern” of wrongdoing — with the narrative arc beginning with the Harper’s December 2008 prorogation manoeuvre — is key to Ignatieff’s construction of a plot that reaches its climax with last week’s “unprecedented” and “historic” resolution declaring the Conservatives “in contempt of Parliament.”

For his part, Harper will be telling a much simpler story, reminding voters about the relatively strong state of the Canadian economy and the need to stay the course with his Conservative government during this “unnecessary election” because of the world’s “fragile” financial recovery and ongoing political instability.

Ignatieff’s narrative will have to be more elaborate, more nuanced and more gripping. A major challenge will be holding the attention of his audience while he tells this complicated tale. But will Canadians see it as a masterpiece of truth-telling or a forgettable piece of pulp fiction?

As Ignatieff’s “Contempt” story takes shape in the coming weeks, the Liberal leader’s critics are sure to see it in the light of an observation made by Scar Tissue’s unnamed narrator: “We tell stories as if to refuse the truth, as if we say that we make our fate, rather than simply endure it. But in truth we make nothing. We live, but we cannot shape life.”